Now you need to market your website! And that takes a serious strategy of its own.

Sure, if you’ve optimized your website for the search engines, you’ll generate traffic … eventually. But even the strongest SEO strategy should include an external marketing strategy to build buzz and get your clients interested in what you’ve done. If all you’re doing is sending out a short email or including a line or two in your newsletter announcing the new site, you’re not doing enough. No matter how exciting you think your new website might be, your clients are simply not going to take time out of their busy day to visit it unless you can show them, “What’s in it for me?”

Market your website with a strategy that fits your audience

A consultant whose newsletter I read recently marketed her new website with what I consider a brilliant strategy. The consultant, Chris Marlow, is a business coach for copywriters. Her newsletters are terrific, so I tend to read any email I get from her.

Apparently, she has just launched a new website where she sells her coaching services and a set of tools and courses designed specifically for copywriters. Rather than just announcing the new website and being done with it, she undoubtedly put some thought into how she could build buzz and get lots of targeted traffic to the new site.

Her target audience, of course, is copywriters. We’re fiendish about grammar (even if we’re breaking the rules, we know exactly what the rules are), we’re never done editing and polishing our own writing, and we’re always dissecting everything we read to analyze the writer’s approach and to see if we could have written it better. In other words, we’re a pretty tough crowd when it comes to the written word.

And of course, like everyone else, we’re incredibly busy and frequently inundated with offers from so-called experts.

Chris’ faced a big challenge with marketing her website. She wanted to get lots of copywriters visiting the website, and she wanted them to stay on the site and really engage with the site.

So Chris took an inspired approach.

She created a contest. The prize? The winner’s choice of one course or product, up to $597 in value. The challenge? To find as many errors or glitches with her website as possible. Whoever found the most imperfections in her site would win.

Brilliant. And a bit ballsy, too.

The right website marketing strategy gets your audience to sit up and take notice

Chris found a unique way to pique the interest of copywriters, to spark our natural perfectionist tendencies, and to get us to visit her site and read every word.

I’ll admit, when she first announced this contest, I wondered if it was smart of her to open herself up like that and expose her imperfections. But then I thought a bit more. Of course, Chris is a copywriter and a perfectionist too, so I’m willing to bet she had already combed through her site with a fine-toothed comb before launch, and I doubt there were many errors on her site to begin with. And any copywriter out there understands that, after looking at a piece of writing for so long, even the best of us will miss a few things here and there. So even if there were a tiny handful of errors, I don’t think it cost her much goodwill among copywriters.

And the payoff had huge potential. Lots of interested readers – who wouldn’t be interested in winning a nearly $600 value? Lots of engagement – you’d have to read through each page carefully in order to find any small error Chris may have missed. And you can bet that plenty of those readers also paid attention to Chris’ overall value proposition and probably went on to buy her products.

Now, to be sure, she could have played it safe. She could have simply announced the new website in her newsletter and just assumed that a certain percentage of readers might click, and then wait and let SEO do the rest.

Instead she took a decisive approach to get as many people actively reading her website as possible.

Which strategy do you think will get better results?

And on second thought, how are you actively marketing your own website?